Webarts

In spite of the millennial call for an end to issues in Winter
y2k, ebr11 - a new issue - went online at the turn of the year
2000/2001. There would be yet another issue a year later
("Music/Sound/Noise") before the transition to the new interface
could be completed.

ebr11 webarts winter 2000/2001

The essays in this issue of ebr, focusing on the visual arts in
various media, came together while the journal itself was
undergoing a design overhaul and significant organizational
expansion. Indeed, we intended to present Webarts not as a numbered
issue at all, but as part of a new interface whose database
architecture would eliminate the need for periodical publication.
More than a year in the making, ebr 3.0 will now be launched in
Fall 2001, when Webarts and all the previous issues - five years
worth of ebr - will enter the database. [this prediction proved
optimistic by more than a year - ed.]

Like the Webarts here under discussion, ebr approaches the
Internet, in the first instance, as a unique art medium. That is
why, although ebr remains a literary journal, the editors have
always emphasized its visual aspect. We do this not for purposes of
illustration only; nor is it our archival mission to scan images
and texts that were never intended for digital reproduction.
Rather, we're interested in how the hand and the eye of a reader,
accustomed to the turning pages of a book, can be guided through a
well-designed web installation by the collaborative action of word
and image. That the habits of linear reading die hard, however, was
brought home to us by a review this year in Europe's leading design
journal, whose author reproduced the longest essay in ebr10 and our
entire list of contents, without ever mentioning the visual
movement that takes a reader from one screen to the other, let
alone the thREADs that open up each essay to the web
environment.

In general this year, Electronic Literature received tough
treatment at the hands of reviewers; hence the generous selection
of ripostes in this issue.

[excerpts from the EYE article and responses to popular reviews
of e-literature can be read in the former riPOSTe section. -
ed.]

In the coming year, as the new interface takes us further into
the web environment, we are adding sound to ebr's medial mix. But
sound considered, like the visuals, as a compositional element - an
aural environment for online reading; but also a non-verbal space
for unreading, unwriting, watching, and listening. With this in
mind, we invite submissions for an upcoming series, co-edited by
Cary Wolfe, Mark Amerika, and Joseph Tabbi, titled
music/sound/noise - or msn, appropriate to the medium whose
incipient commodification promises to define the Internet economy.
At the same time, however, msn offers an opportunity for
dematerialization, and for a deconstruction of the commodity,
"music," into its less widely marketable composition as "sound" and
"noise." There's a parallel here to the sort of critique that ebr
has attempted from the start, a project that spatializes the web,
but in an especially fleeting and evanescent way. As one
literary/academic site within a network whose extension is
literally global, ebr has needed to organize itself within and
continually adjust to the very environment we critique. With the
introduction of sound, this problematic - the achievement of an
interdependent web identity - can now open onto the question of
what are the relations between sound, then noise, then music. As
"sound" approaches ever more closely the condition of music it too
approaches a kind of writing, which is then retroactively revealed
to have been "noisy" all along.

Working from the perspective of sound as one of the "spatial
arts," contributors might raise the question of how one should
navigate through the rhetoric of noise (while filtering the noise
of rhetoric). Who wants to remix this noise into
pseudo-autobiographical narrative "mystory" critifiction?

Why did Progressve Networks change their name to Real
Networks?

And what about the new Senator from Washington state, the
42-year-old Maria Cantwell who funded her campaign with moneys
cashed in from her job at Real Networks? What's up with all that
media noise?